“It’s not wartime, she’ll be fine.” He had a controlled, rhythmic way of doing pushups, slow on the descent and explosive on the up. The movement was synchronized with his breathing.

  “Please…” she whispered. “Her father is old. He was burned very badly in a factory fire and is blind. She supports him with her pay, and if you degrade her rank, discharge her dishonorably, she’ll not only lose all her service benefits, but she’ll never find any employment anywhere again… Isn’t there a way to work out the restitution from her pay? I’ll help. You can take my pay to reimburse the state.”

  “Tell me where you can buy morphine, Lena.”

  Nowhere. It was one of the medications on the watch list, highly controlled by the state because of the shortage.

  “It might seem like petty theft but it’s a serious crime, Lena. What happens if my HKU returns with injuries? How do we perform amputation or any surgery without analgesics, mmm? What happens when my soldiers are dying from a gut wound and we have nothing to help ease their pain? We’re not missing one or two vials, the woman stole enough to overdose an entire platoon.”

  Yes, Lena knew. Polina had said as much.

  “It’s Commissar Boris,” Lena said. “He’s addicted to morphine. Polina took it for him. Not all at once but over the years. She didn’t realize how much it had been.” Silly woman, she hadn’t thought anyone would notice, and maybe they wouldn’t have, but the 118’s medic had to do inventory when he looked for morphine to take on the mission and found vials missing.

  “What kind of excuse is that?” he asked.

  “The commissar should be reprimanded, not Polina, Captain.”

  “Well, unless Boris wants to volunteer a statement, I have her for the theft.”

  “What if I took them?” Lena asked. She didn’t have an ailing father, no family, and she was far more likely to survive any labor camp than the frail Polina.

  “Don’t be fucken stupid. I’m not playing.” Misha sat up, flushed, his midnight hair falling over his face. Being red like this made his eyes completely grey in comparison. He grabbed his dog tag from the bench Lena was sitting on and slipped it over his head, making her notice the cartridge that was on the same chain, and took a sip of water from his canteen. “Don’t piss me off, Lena. You have enough troubles.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I received a letter the other day,” he took another drink of water and swished in his mouth, “from your training officer. He says you shot him on purpose.”

  “What! Why is he writing you?”

  “I wanted to promote you a while back and asked for a reference from the academy. Instead, I’ve been told you are an unstable lunatic who can’t handle firearms. So, unless you want to have your own tribunal as well, I suggest you don’t test me today.”

  “He lied about being married!”

  “And that’s a reason to shoot your sergeant?”

  “No…”

  “That’s what I thought.” He strode out.

  “They’re not going to have a tribunal for me, I’m only a laundress,” she mumbled.

  “What?” his voice came from the hallway.

  “Nothing!”

  She returned to her quarters and watched her sunflower friend wilt as though snow had fallen. Polina cried her eyes out, talking about how she and her father would starve in the streets now, and to top it off, asshole Boris pretended to not know her at all. When Lena kicked his door in, he threatened to write her up for ‘unpatriotic behavior’.

  Valya turned into a bitch, well she’d always been one anyway, and wouldn’t let Polina into the radio room when she reported for her shift.

  “Who knows what else you’ll steal.” The tall brunette slammed the door in her face.

  Then the quartermaster came to demand Polina’s uniform and gear, even the underwear she’d been wearing because it had been issued by the republic.

  Polina threatened to kill herself and had to be sedated. Her knife and sidearm were confiscated, and now she was cuffed to her bed in the infirmary while the nurse scorned her for stealing vital supplies.

  At nightfall, Lena found herself outside Misha’s door again. He was in his office, behind his desk, and unlike the rest of the bunker where they had glaring white light, his office had a soft yellow hue, dark wooden furniture, and carpet on the floor.

  “Comrade Captain.” She saluted at the door.

  He lifted his grey gaze from the paperwork to see her as though he hadn’t already known it was her, then returned to whatever he was writing.

  “Comrade Captain,” she said again.

  “What?” he barked.

  “Permission to enter, sir.”

  “What do you want?”

  Lena took that as permission, entered, and closed the door behind her. She walked across his nice carpet and stood by his desk, letting her shadow fall on what he was writing.

  He set his pen down and looked up at her. “What?”

  There was a framed photograph of a pilot (notable by his leather cap and goggles) on the wall behind Misha. “Is that your father?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “My condolences,” she said.

  The republic’s fledgling airforce had extraordinary casualties during the early years of the war. That branch no longer existed, for the republic had neither planes nor pilots anymore. The same was true of the navy. Wooden ships didn’t fare well against fire-breathing drakon and the iron ones ate up too much fuel, consumed too many resources to build, took too many men to operate, and did very little against the drakon. They were mostly junked, and the steel was now being used for railways, bridges, and the overall construction effort of the republic.

  “You didn’t come to talk about my father. What do you want?” he asked.

  “Polina,” she said. “Isn’t there anything I can do?”

  “No.”

  “Write me up instead then. I have no one. I don’t care.”

  He was going to say something, but didn’t, and sighed instead. It wasn’t that she didn’t care. She didn’t want to be sent to labor camp or spend the rest of her life with a black stamp on her tetrat. She was just pressing her luck because, unlike Boris, Misha wasn’t an asshole.

  “Come on, Captain,” she whispered. “Just write the morphine as damaged and give her an honorable completion of duty, please. I’ll pay for it, somehow…”

  She’d been looking right at him and caught it although it had been less than a second. A look, a thought, an idea, flickered through his grey eyes, one which she recognized very well. She’d grown up in an orphanage with boys, volunteered for scrap duty with boys when she was too young to enlist, went to the academy with men, and for the past five years she’d been stationed here, also with men. They had a look when they thought of sex, and it just went through his head. It’d been a reactionary thing to what she’d said, ‘somehow’, but he didn’t dwell on it and it passed.

  “You should go, Lena,” he said instead, fiddling with papers.

  Nope. She sat on his desk, picked up a paper, and looked at it. “What’s this?”

  “What are you doing?”

  Helping out a friend was what she was doing. “Order came in from Command and Control to deploy HKU-118?” She frowned at the page, turning it. “What are they looking for? What happened at Seventeen?”

  He snatched the paper from her. “Tread carefully, Private. You don’t have the security clearance.”

  “You don’t look like your father,” she said.

  “Comrade Lena, you’re being incredibly inappropriate.”

  She knew. She leaned into him and whispered in his ear, feeling him tense. “It’s just some vials, Misha. Write them off. They were going to expire anyway, like the antibiotics we have, mmm?”

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked.

  “What am I doing?” she breathed an inch from his face. His grey eyes weren’t so scary this close, and she deliberately dropped her gaze to his mouth, and then to between his legs.

  “Get out,” he hissed.

  “Make me.”

  Oh, it turned out he could ‘make her’ very easily. He picked her up, carried her across the room, set her down in the corridor, and slammed the door in her face. She even heard him lock it from inside.

  Damn! She knew she wasn’t tall, and she didn’t have big breasts, but still… He’d kind of made her feel like shit. Perhaps she’d misread the look, and this was going to be stupid every time she saw him.

  Bad, Lena, bad!

  Lena mulled over breakfast, trying her hand at composing a letter again to take her mind off yesterday. She’d gotten two words in, ‘Dear Demitri’, so if by chance someone else found her letter, they’d know it wasn’t meant for them, when Polina ran in flapping a piece of paper. She slid on the stairs and fell down the last few steps but popped up still happy.

  “Lena!” She rushed to Lena’s table and plopped on the bench, heaving. “I looked for you everywhere!”

  “What happened?” She wondered if she’d received another letter from Demitri, but she didn’t think the mail truck was due for another two months or so.

  “The vulture signed off on a medical discharge for me. Look!” She flapped the paper. “I’m going home, Lenachka! I think it worked I threatened to off myself.” Then she leaned forward and whispered, “I wasn’t going to do it.”

  Yeah, that usually got one sent to the labor camp, much like intentionally wounding yourself. Lena frowned. “Why do you guys call him that, the vulture?”

  “Because he looks like one. The big ugly birds, have you seen one?”

  Lena’s frown deepened. She didn’t think the captain was bad looking. Well, what did Polina know? She thought Boris was a good guy. Lena spent the rest of the morning helping her friend pack, get her things in order, and they sang about spring maidens while they did it, probably annoying everyone who was trying to sleep.

  Then she helped her carry her luggage out. Her departure was unscheduled and there were no trucks coming, so Oleg was going to take her to the train station, which was some fifty miles away, and the kind old man had harnessed three of his best horses to the troika.

  “Bye, Lenachka! Write me!” Polina waved her scarf as the carriage trotted off along the narrow trail through the woods.

  She wasn’t sure why Misha changed his mind, but he’d been kind, and she thought to get him something to thank him. So, at the end of every quarter, when supply requests were made to Command, the captain would ask for sugar, and every time a supply truck came he would go see if they had sugar. They never did. For as long as he’d been at 47, which was three years, he’d been asking for sugar and was yet to get any. Lena wanted to get him sugar, and she’d seen the commissar flash around some just the other day. She had a plan.

  The quartermaster who was in charge of all the keys, rooms, and supplies had an obsession with a nurse here, Natalya. He would follow her around, and she would laugh. That was how that was going. So, Lena took a pair of Natalya’s underwear, which wasn’t weird because she was the laundress, then sold it to the quartermaster in exchange for a vial of morphine, then knocked on Boris’s door and turned that into three cubes of sugar. She’d ask where he’d gotten sugar, but she knew he had a grandmother who sent him a care package every quarter.

  Then she waited on the path the captain took around the perimeter for his daily run. He ran for something stupid like ten miles every day, whether it was raining or snowing, and strode or marched everywhere he went. She’d never seen him stroll or saunter. He had zero chill.

  A lot of Rosya was forest and the terrain around 47 was a mix of silver birch to the east and spruce and pine everywhere else. She sat along the road and among the silver birch, the wind rusting and whistling through the trees. Sometimes it sounded like a storm though the weather was calm. The soil was soft here and the birch let in enough sunlight that grass and flowers grew on the forest floor. Come fall, the leaves would turn the color of fire, and tiny strawberries would populate the ground. After heavy rain, they could also forage for mushrooms.

  Lena found some gruzdi under the foliage and had been eating them raw though they should really be cooked, when she saw the captain down the trail and got up, still chewing, and making a face because the mushrooms were bitter. She’d gotten some dirt in her mouth and spat that out while she waited for him. He slowed his pace when he saw her and jogged toward her, catching his breath.

  “Captain!” She waved.

  “What is it, Lena?” He walked past her, and she followed.

  “Polina left,” she started.

  “I know,” he said. “And?”

  “Here.” She dug through her satchel and produced the sugar cubes which she’d wrapped in a handkerchief. “For your tea.”

  He looked back at what she had, then kept on walking. She hadn’t thought this through and imagined she looked weird holding out sugar to him as though he was a horse, especially because he didn’t take it, and now she was hiking with sugar cubes on her palm.

  “Look, Lena.” He turned and she ran into him. He stood there with his hands on his hips first, then stuffed into his pockets, grimacing while he looked at something to the side. “I don’t know what you want. I don’t have much to give you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Though she hadn’t meant to, she’d frustrated him. He struggled with words and sighed.

  “It’s just sugar. Here.” She took his hand and placed the cubes on his palm.

  He stared at it as though she’d given him a bullion of gold or a snake… She couldn’t read him.

  “Look, I… Tell me what you hope to get out of this.” He gestured at the space between them. “I don’t have much. So, tell me first what you want, and I’ll see if it’s something I can give you. It may not be, Lena.”

  “What do I want?” She shrugged. “A private apartment in Krasnaversk.”

  He frowned and she saw he’d taken her seriously, and now he was thinking if he was able to get one for her. “Misha.” She grabbed his arm. “Misha, I’m joking.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “All right, tell me what you think is happening,” she said. She had an inkling but didn’t want to jump the gun and find herself in an even dumber situation than she was already in.

  He hesitated, a lot. He dropped his gaze more than once to where she still held his arm. Then asked, “Are you not offering a physical relationship?”

  First of all, that was what she thought he thought. Secondly, he was so, so, so bad at it. And thirdly, she could get an apartment for that?

  “Stop it,” she said. “Stop it. That’s insane, so stop it. It’s not possible you think so little of yourself. Look at you. Have you seen a mirror? Have you seen what’s on your shelf or the stripes on your shoulder? Do you know what the ratio of men to women is in Rosya in our age group? You’re not all right in the head if you think you need to offer extravagant things to women for them to want you.”

  “Not women, just you,” he said.

  All right, maybe he wasn’t that bad at it because that was a deal closer… and she kissed him. Because he was so tall, she pulled from his collar, rose on her tiptoes, and she kissed him.

  Bad, Lena, bad!

  He’d closed his eyes. She had too, but he was late to open them. She could smell not only his clothes but his skin because he’d been running. That had been unexpected, and she’d made herself dizzy. Some soldiers had been out on routine training with their sergeant and they were returning. Lena didn’t see them, but she heard them. Misha did as well, looking in that direction.

  “I was on my way to target practice,” he said, though he didn’t have his rifle on him. “Did you want to join me?”

  “Will you get your vintovka?” she asked. Because yes, yes, she did. She would never get another chance to practice with someone so highly decorated.

  six

  Birds in the Sky

  The breeze whispered through the forest, and Lena heard loons on the lake. The deep blue sky with white cotton clouds reflected on the still surface of the lake, merging heaven and earth. Loons, when they were lost in the mist, would call out to one another, sounding like the cry of a lone wolf, but they weren’t lost just then. A raft of them glided on the water, some carrying little chicks on their backs.

  Lena lay on her belly, zeroing in on a dark, star shaped mark on the bark of a birch across the lake—seven hundred yards.

  “Wind, Misha,” she whispered.

  He lay on his back next to her, squinting up at the sky with a blade of grass in his mouth. “There’s an anemometer in my bag,” he said.

  Lena couldn’t tell if he was toying with her, but he wasn’t… very skilled. He’d wildly missed at eight hundred yards, full four hundred short of the longest confirmed kill during the war. Not his record, someone else’s, but still. He couldn’t calculate bullet drop, she thought.

  Well, she was out of practice too—missed the mark and scared some loons. The next shot ate dirt, and she didn’t even see where the third went.

  She blew a raspberry and turned to him.

  “Did you get anything?” he asked.

  “Yes, leaves and dirt.”

  “What were you shooting at?”

  Well, leaves and dirt. She didn’t want to kill a loon for nothing. She sat up and picked wildflowers near her, laying them out by the length of the stem to weave a crown for herself. “Tell me about the drakon.”

  “What about them?” he asked.

  “You have thirteen kills. Tell me about that.”

  “Thirteen confirmed kills,” he said. “You need an officer to confirm your kills and we didn’t always have those around on the field.”

  “Are they all Fury?” she asked.

  “Mostly,” he said. “And a couple of Shadow.”

  “Shut up! No one’s seen a Shadow.”

  He turned and wrinkled his nose at her. All the menace vanished when he did that, and he looked like a young boy. “Do you mean you’ve never seen one?” he asked.

  “Shadow is not even a real drakon!”

 

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